Sometimes the Press is so Stupid

If you were planning to spend the weekend in New York City, you wouldn’t tell someone you were going to the Hotel Edison Times Square. No, you’d say you were going to New York City.

If you were going to, say, Key West, you wouldn’t tell people you were going to the Parrot Key Hotel and Resort. No, you’d say you were going to Key West.

And if you were going to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, you wouldn’t say you were going to the Hotel Monteleone. You’d say you were going to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

So why does the news media, whenever the president who said he would wouldn’t take vacations (and criticized his predecessor for doing so) jets off on his weekly three-day vacation, always explain that he’s going to Mar-a-Lago? Why doesn’t it just say he’s going to his home in Florida?

Or to his home in south Florida? Or to his home in Palm Beach, Florida?

But no, the press feels this apparent compulsion to give free advertising and publicity to the same guy who used free publicity to win the White House.

The press, of course, has a long history of letting politicians walk all over it and tell it how to do its job. During the Bush Junior years the press naively bought into the administration’s explanation that sending more troops to fight in Iraq was a “surge” rather than an escalation, the word that was used when Lyndon Johnson kept sending more soldiers to Vietnam and that instantly inspired protests against the war. More recently, the press permitted politicians to convince it that there was something inappropriate or even corrupt about Hillary Clinton, while a private citizen, taking fees for speaking engagements from large corporations. On the other hand, the press never uttered a peep about Ronald Reagan spending eight years between when his acting career hit the skids, in 1954, and his first run for office, in 1962, going around the country giving speeches about public affairs, mostly consisting of anti-communist screeds, courtesy of generous payments from General Electric.

And of course GE never, ever benefited from the Reagan presidency, right?

When I hit the ball I holler “Five!” because five is so much greater, really greater, than fore.”

The press needs to get its act together and stop rolling over and playing dead to Agent Orange and his Brigade of the Unqualified and Ill-Intended. This, admittedly, is just a small thing, but the press really needs to stop giving free publicity to a billionaire who pretends he’s not paying attention to his business anymore by reporting, whenever that billionaire gets on Air Force One for his weeklythree-day vacation, that he’s jetting to his home in…

Florida.

Or South Florida.

Or Palm Peach.

But not to…you know where, because every time it does that, the press is being played like a violin and the Unqualified and Ill-Intended are laughing at them – and at us, too, for adopting the same language the press inappropriately insists on using.